By Byrne Harrison
Name: Scott Kesselman
Name: Scott Kesselman
Show: Attempts
On Her Life
Relationship to production: Director
Website: blacknotetheatre.com
How did you first get involved in theatre?
An English professor, during my freshman year,
suggested I try out for the theatre and I thought, why not? I auditioned and
got a role in a short play by Shel Silverstein and it opened my eyes to this
whole wonderful world of staged theatre.
Who are your biggest influences?
I draw a lot of inspiration from music - it turns over
and over inside me creating questions, forming dialogues, and telling stories.
If a picture is worth a thousand words a song is worth a great deal more.
Some names the stand out to me now are Keith Emerson, Miles, 'trane, Mozart,
Yes, and Keith Jarrett, as well as, for this piece, the performance artist
Karen Finley.
What is your show about?
Our play reduces the human condition to its raw
components analyzing the inefficiencies of language in expressing out emotions
and exposing self perception as at distance from the real world. Real
world being one obeying the rules of physics and empirical knowledge exists
outside the self. The play exists in a reality personal to one woman, a
reality that is driven by desire and conversely disappointment and showcases
that one's reality can never match another's.
What inspired you to direct it?
I wasn't truly inspired to direct this play until I
had read through the entire play. Upon completion I marveled at the
uniqueness and paradoxical randomness of how each scene flowed to the
next. I also enjoy the challenge of developing characters from a set of
thought presented on a page with no labels.
Who are your collaborators and how long have you been
working with them?
My biggest collaborator on this project was Janelle
Zapata. We've been working together for almost 3 years now. She
introduced me to the script and has been there to shoot ideas back and forth
with since day one. She is also a co-producer and one of my actors.
I cannot say enough about the job she does. Truthfully everyone involved
in this show is a great collaborator. Even my actors all bring something
to the show and their characters that I wouldn't have seen.
Planet Connections donates a portion of the box office
for each show to a charity. What charity has your production chosen and
why?
Our charity is the National Alliance on mental
Illness. We chose this organization because of it's grassroots nature and
attempt at creating a different atmosphere around mental illness. Our
play also delves deeply into the human mind and the intricacies and oddities of
thought and touches on suicide and other themes of mental illness.
Blacknote Theatre wants to help support those with mental illness, remind you
that you're not alone and many people out there are struggling too. Up to
one in four adults battles mental illness. In this period of rapid growth
and change in the human world, our minds, which are evolved for tasks it
incurred 50,000 years ago, are many times not equipped to handle the turmoil of
modern society.
What's next for you after Planet Connections?
I am trying to work on an original play right now and
I also hope to release some original music at some point. I want to
continue to direct with Blacknote Theatre as their love of unconventional
texts and no apologies brand of script-based performance art is too appealing
to pass on.
If you could do one thing to change the world, what
would it be?
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